There are two types of status postings you can just ignore, even if they try to tell you that you are a bad person for not sharing them.

I bet 5 of my friends won’t…

I’m sure you’ve seen these lots of times. One of your friends has copied the text of a status update from someone else and pasted it. They are usually about cancer or depression. After a long text describing the illness you get this at the bottom:

“I’m going to make a bet, without being pessimistic, that out of my Facebook friends that less than 5 will take the time to put this on their wall to help raise awareness of and for those who have [insert illness here]. You just have to copy it from my wall and paste it to yours ”

So, not only content with shouting out that “hey, look what good person I am for doing this,” they also prey upon the conscience of their friends. I mean, who wants to appear to be a bad person not caring about the suffering of others, right?

Wrong! The next time someone post this, just ignore it. You are doing the world (and your newsfeed) a service. And you are a better person than the one who tried to guilt you into sharing.

The only thing you are telling the world by posting it is that not only are you a person who thinks posting a status update about an illness will help fight it. If you really want to make a difference for people with [insert illness here] donate money to organisations working with said infliction. Or volunteer for these organisations. If you want to post and brag about it, that’s fine. But do it without telling everybody how great you are and how awful they are for not doing it.

Actually, posting something like this is the least effective way to fight cancer, depression or what have you. Stop it!

I want to teach my students how fast a photo spreads

I’m sure you’ve seen this one a lot, especially lately. A well meaning teacher says she wants to teach the kids of her class how fast a photo is spread on the internet. So they post a photo of a sign with this message, and tell everyone to share it. And since you think it’s important that the kids learn how to be careful on the internet, you do just that. DON’T!

First of all, this meme has been going on for over 8 years now (and a lot of times the poster is fake and it’s just someone having fun, and not a teacher). There are hundred teachers who have done it, so there’s no need to do it anymore. We know how fast a photo can spread.

My suggestion is this: Instead of posting your own meme, teach your kids how to google it. They can then use google, find the articles telling how fast a photo spreads, and then learn that they should be careful with photos on the internet. They also learn that they don’t need to spam others with things like this.

Another reason why you shouldn’t spam the newsfeed of your friends with this is that this has been done so much now that people are tired of it. It’s become spam! So most people have started to ignore it. So the more who post these, the more they will be ignored, and then you teach the children that photos are NOT spread as fast as their teacher claims.

So stop sharing these photos as well.

Now, if someone could just teach the parents about being careful with photos on the internet, we might get somewhere…

Aren’t there times when you where you are itching to post a scatching status posting about something or someone? But you can’t do it, because you don’t want any persons involved to read your posting.

Luckily Facebook has a function not many people know about that lets you do just that: Post something and then tell what people should not be allowed to read neither the posting itself, or any likes or comments either.

This is how you do it:

Write your posting:

To the left of the Post button you have a pulldown menu:

Click on this button:

Go to Friends except… and click on it. This screen pops up (I have anonymized people in my list, but you will see your friends’ profile photos, names and workplace):

In the top of my list I have the two last persons I blocked from seeing a posting. You can see that they are active, because of the red circle behind their names. If I do want them to see this posting, I simply click on the red icon, so that it becomes white:

Now the person in the top of the list will not be included in this exception list.

To choose a person that should not see this new posting, you simply search for their name in the search field:

Type as many letters as needed in the search field until you see the name of the person listed. Then simply click on the circle to the right of their name:

After clicking on it, it will turn red:

If there are other people you want to hide this posting from, simply search for them as well and click on the circle icon behind their names.

When you have found all the names you simply click on the button Save Changes.

However, it can be a good idea to review the list of people you want to block. To do so, click on the little x to the right inside the search field:

Now you can see the list of all the people you have blocked for this posting:

As you can see I have two people whom I want to block from seeing this posting. The person I removed from the block list is still listed among the others that I’ve chosen, but as we can see the icon behind the name is white, which means he won’t be blocked.

Click Save Changes. You will now return to this screen:

As you can see on the pulldown button, this posting will now be shown to all friends, except the ones you just chose. You can even see the names of people it should be hidden for it you click on the pulldown arrow in the button:

If you change this to Public or Friends, the people you just picked will still see the posting, like everybody else. You choice has to stay on Friends except…

However, the next time you choose Friends except…, all the people you just added to this list will still be listed here. So if you want any of them to see the posting the next time you choose Friends except…, you have to actively remove them from the list.